Planting a Mini-Orchard

Ignore the bucket in this illustration! See update below. Update 3/13/2011: I met Brad Lancaster last night and he told me that he and Art Ludwig no longer use the upside down bucket described in this post. The reason is that detergents can build up in the hole. In my experience the bucket was also an unnecessary step. While I have a clay soil, the hillside drains fairly well. A properly sized mulch basin should suffice to allow greywater to infi...

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Tracking the Mood of the Gardener

Swiss chard from the winter of 2010 A Root Simple reader I ran into this weekend took issue with my assertion that fall is the best time to start a vegetable garden in Southern California. Thinking about it some more I think she may have a point. Some of you may have noticed that we have a new feature on the blog–if you click on an individual blog post you’ll see a list of related posts at the bottom. Looking at some of those older posts showed t...

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Saturday Linkages: Fueling Up

Only in India DIY Six ways to reuse plastic mesh bags: http://collectedquotidian.com/2012/10/21/six-ways-to-reuse-plastic-mesh-produce-bags/ … How I Work: I’m Mark Frauenfelder, Editor-In-Chief of MAKE Magazine, and This Is How I Work – http://lifehacker.com/5954275/im-mark-frauenfelder-editor+in+chief-of-make-magazine-and-this-is-how-i-work … Free Heat for Your Home: Homemade Briquettes and Logs http://naturalbuildingblog.com/free-heat-for-your-...

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Book Review: The Blood of the Earth: An Essay on Magic and Peak Oil

Phoebe says that despite her midnight coat and lambent eyes, she has nothing whatsoever to do with magic. Or peak oil. And for the record, she also scorns Halloween. What do magic and peak oil have to do with one another? Quite a lot, actually, if you believe the author, John Michael Greer. And if you read The Blood of the Earth: An Essay on Magic and Peak Oil you’ll probably come to agree with him, because in this book, as in all of his writing,...

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Sad foot sign, the end is comin’

...all seriousness, our corrupt city government does a very poor job of placemaking. The best they can do is name intersections after people with pathetic little signs posted high up on a signal. You know you’re in trouble when a podiatrist sign is a better placemaking option. Paris LA ain’t. I think we’re going to have to take things into our own hands and build our own Happy Foot Sad Foot Arc de Triomphe. One we do that the People’s Parliament of...

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